Currently, hotel chains offer hotel patrons “frequent guest programs”, where these guest programs offer patrons rewards for staying at hotels managed by a hotel administration group. These hotel chains may even maintain dossiers on patron preferences such as which newspaper the customer prefers or even information on the patron's birthday or wedding anniversary dates in an attempt to personalize the interactions with the patron. At some hotels, guest information is displayed on the TV in the room in which the patron is staying with an announcement saying “Welcome to our hotel, Mr. Smith, our valued guest.”
Hotel chains are attempting to differentiate themselves by offering larger video channel lineups in order to appeal to frequent guests' varied tastes in video programming. As a result, the in-hotel video-watching experience is both enticing and frustrating at the same time; guests are happy that their varied tastes are being catered to, but at the same time, the guest is forced to channel surf through more channels about which they do not care, but which are made available to appeal to other guests' varied tastes.
It would be desirable if hotels could find ways of providing improved video customization features without requiring the hotel to solicit and then maintain the video customization preference information from its customers. It would also be desirable if, at least in some embodiments, methods and apparatus could be developed for providing customers with access to premium channels based on subscriptions which they have at home.